The Cienega Springs plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
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92° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1934. Next is 90° in 1934.
Cienega Springs’s center stands about 380 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 360 ft to 1,040 ft, a difference of 680 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Planet Peak, about 3,070 ft, 14 miles east.
The section below crosses 11 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Paleocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 16 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 5 smaller units along the line are not listed.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Cienega Springs reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Colorado: about 280 river miles.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cienega Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cienega Springs has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 108° in July; winter nights fall to about 43° in January. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cienega Springs normally reaches 76° and falls to 52°. The record high is 89°, in 1990; the record low 38°, in 2012. The most rain on this date, 0.13 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at Parker Reservoir, 8 miles north-northeast, 360 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
